Susanna Heller (1956–2021)

Susanna Heller (1956–2021) Karen Wilkin (bio) In Memoriam Susanna Heller was a connoisseur of the gritty aspects of New York, enthusiastically embracing unexpected views, neglected corners, utilitarian infrastructure, and more. She found excitement and stimulus in things that most of us ignore or try not to look at, reveling in chance encounters with construction debris and improvised structures or in unusual views of familiar places. She evoked, in a wide variety of ways, contemporary life in New York with its different kinds of public transportation, endless construction sites, derelict street furnishings, traffic, and the like. A list of things that stimulated Heller's work would read very much like one by Stuart Davis, another passionate admirer of the modern city of his day, that included "skyscraper architecture . . . gasoline stations, chain-store fronts, and taxicabs . . . and electric signs." An indefatigable pedestrian, Heller traveled remarkable distances from her Brooklyn home and studio on foot. A residency on a high floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center gave her yet another, vertiginous view of the city. The rapid drawings she made on her walks, which ended up paving the walls of her workspace, frequently became the basis of related works on paper, made in the studio. They also fed energetic paintings that translated her explosive, freewheeling graphite and ink lines and occasional patches of color into expressionistic urban landscape paintings. Some drawings are clearly casual, tossed-off studies, but others are self-sufficient, stand-alone images. Toward the end of Heller's life, when illness made it impossible for her to roam as she habitually had done, she drew the city from her window, contrasting expansive distances—sometimes observed, sometimes imagined—with pitiless self-portraits. She treated her own frail, pain-wracked, often bedridden body as subject matter with the same dispassionate eye she turned on abandoned lots and distant skyline views, never rejecting the unlovely or the disturbing. She had done something similar when her husband was hospitalized with a life-threatening illness years before. She drew him, unconscious in his bed, against the vast city view from his room, as if comforting and, perhaps, distancing herself from a nearly unbearable reality by concentrating on the deeply ingrained ritual [End Page 85] of making marks on paper. Heller's last drawings conflate her unsentimental images of herself with views of the ultimate urban place, now inaccessible but still infinitely desirable. Heller stressed spontaneity and speed, as if wanting not only to capture things seen, but also to recapitulate her awareness of her body in motion as she walked tirelessly across Brooklyn. The small size of most drawings suggests both expediency and intimacy, while splatters, scrawls, irregular shapes, and occasional collaging heighten our awareness of the physicality of even the smallest works and declare the artist's agency in even the most apparently rapid examples. At the same time, we are alerted to a sense of immediacy and seeming indifference to conventional ideas about result; encountering a group of Heller's speedy drawings is like watching thought processes, unmediated by ideas about "good" composition. Born in New York and raised in Montreal, Heller was a graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, Nova Scotia, before moving to New York in 1978, becoming a Brooklyn resident in 1981. She exhibited frequently in both solo and group shows in New York and elsewhere in the US, as well as in Canada and Europe. She showed regularly at Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto, Ontario, and had exhibitions at Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery, Halifax, Nova Scotia; and Museum London, London, Ontario; along with the Grand Rapids Art Museum, Michigan, and the Museum de Lakenhal, Leiden, Netherlands. Heller's work is included in numerous private and public collections, including the Art Gallery of Ontario. Her 30-foot mural, Restless Prowling from Night to Day Break, is installed in the Toronto-Dominion Centre. Among other awards, Heller received several grants from the Canada Council, a fellowship from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a residency at Yaddo, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. [End Page 86] Click for larger view View full...

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